robo-crush

'I would take care of it and it would take care of me.' -- Old, frail-looking man in green parka on subway, "Roomba Nation," Patricia Marx, The New Yorker, November 26, 2018

Take care.

Caregiver.

Command.

Performance.

Artificial.

Intelligence.

Limbs.

Artificial.

Heart.

Emotional.

Intelligence.

Feeling.

Virtual.

Reality.

Me.

You.

It.

Take.

Care.

Give or take.

break fast, slowly

Upon reflection, breakfast is my favorite meal. This from a guy who sermonizes on the value and importance of communal eating. This from one who loftily pontificates on the tribal need for family interaction around one table, even if voices and views are discordant.

Breakfast involves ritual. Breakfast tea with milk, exactly three slices of Heidelberg Baking Company bread, preferably Cracked Wheat, with Earth Balance buttery spread, one slice with Welch's grape jelly.

I typically read from The New Yorker or the New York Times, one from several days ago.

I take my time.

Time takes me.

Kokonuts vs. Kokonuts

I have just read about Daniel Bejar and Daniel Bejar in The New Yorker. One is a musician, another an artist. The artist has made himself look like the musician and as an "art" project in real time in real life is playing on the same-name identity. His project is called Googleganger, with those two dots over the a.

All of which got me thinking.

Who, after all, is Pawlie Kokonuts?

And if I used my real name, would it really be me?

Who is me?

This is what employers and education officials don't seem to get. They warn people to be careful about their online identity and online representations, but who is who? And what is what? What is real? Why can't anything online be considered the mere fictional fabrications of a virtual persona?

This is nothing new in literature, going back to Truman Capote's non-fiction novel "In Cold Blood," and the same with many works by Norman Mailer. Frederick Exley wrote "fictional memoirs," featuring a character named Frederick Exley. But he wasn't Frederick Exley the author, was he?

So, who is who? And what's what?

Deep questions.

quotable quotation quote

It has been said that fear is the chief activator of our character defects.

I concur. That surely makes sense in terms of personal growth, or its lack.

"If you want to make the right decision for the future, fear is not a very good consultant."

-- Markus Dohle, chairman and CEO of Random House, as quoted by Ken Auletta in The New Yorker, April 26, 2010. (The discussion concerned pricing negotiations regarding e-books.)

True in the mercantile arena too.

3-D writing

Picture this:

A cartoon [by Kanin, on page 28] in the April 12, 2010, edition of the esteemed magazine The New Yorker [The New Yorker has traditionally termed them "drawings"]:

A bow-tied man (publisher? adman? businessman?) at a desk says (according to the caption) to a flummoxed-looking fellow sitting in a chair across the desk:

"Can you rewrite this in 3-D?"

Such is the challenge of writing that sings.

I say no more.

reading matter

I've asked before, I'll ask now:

What are you reading?

Last night I started The Vanished Hands, by Robert Wilson.

I've read The Hidden Assassins, The Company of Strangers, The Blind Man of Seville, and A Small Death in Lisbon by Robert Wilson.

I recommend his work: intelligent, readable, captivating, imaginative, literary. Worth a try. Although he might be classified as a crime writer, I'd say he goes beyond the genre.

Plus, I've always got an issue of The New Yorker magazine, new or old, by the bed.

visible erasure

From the January 11, 2010, edition of The New Yorker, "Top of the Pops," an article by Louis Menand on Andy Warhol:

". . . he painted over 'Thirteen Most Wanted Men' with silver paint--a visible erasure that was widely read as a statement about censorship."

Visible erasure.

I love that oxymoron.

Reminds me of Thomas DeQuincey calling the human brain a palimpsest, which, as you can see from the Online Etymology Dictionary, is a word akin to palin, which is YIKES akin to moron, not oxymoron.

In the long run, I'd say that all blogging is subject to the palimpsest of visible erasures in the Ephemerasphere of cyberspace.

Arbitrary Obituary Somnolence (AOS)

Late on Sunday nights I used to loll myself to sleep sometimes by reading the wedding announcements in the Times. It was mindless entertainment highlighted by the fact that in many ways it was always about the same people, the same clubs, the same lineage, the same celebrity-mongering, the same square-jawed celebration of power, prestige, and position (3P).

Last night, not having yet gotten to that section, I browsed the obituaries at the end of Section A.

You learn things.

A finely written obit is an art.

It tells a story.

I learned about Marty Forscher and Shelby Singleton.

The paid obits are another story (other stories): more heart-braking (stopping the heart) as well as heart-breaking, less objective, more celebratory.

Still, you learn things.

I saw the name "Chast": two paid obits for Elizabeth Chast, 97, and thought of Roz Chast, one of my favorite cartoonists in The New Yorker.

Sure enough, Roz Chast is listed as one of the survivors.

Condolences.

This is probably a tiresome and old-fogey thing to say, but I don't think you find information like that by browsing the Internet. Granted, you find different information.

But I don't think I would have ever made such obituary discoveries with my laptop on my lap in bed. No, there's something about droopy eyes, paper curling downward or slipping out of your grip, and reading the last dregs of Section A.

Heaven's (Not Hell's) Bells

Although I consider Edgar Allan Poe vastly overrated, maybe he was onto something concerning the magic of bells.

A story in The New Yorker of April 27, 2009, about the bells of Russian monasteries, states:

"The curative and purifying properties of church bells are elaborated on numerous Russian Orthodox Web sites."

According to The New Yorker article, folklore, popular belief, and legend assert that the ringing of church bells:

• prevented the spread of plague and epidemics
• provides pain management
• kills flu viruses
• produces ultrasonic waves that "curdle the proteins of jaundice-causing virus cells"
• combats mental retardation in children
  
• encourages flax to grow (what exactly is flax? it was always listed as a major product in fourth-grade geography)
• purifies the air by activating super-lightweight microleptons
• wards off hurricanes
• dispels radiation
• relieves constipation
• stimulates erotic control centers in the cerebral cortex
• enables baseball hitters to hit more home runs
• turns Rush Limbaugh into a rational commentator

Okay, okay, so the last four bullet items were ringers (HAHAHAHAHAHA!) put in there by Pavel Laughorismovich Kokonuts. Just wanted to see if you were still reading.

Hey, even if half those things are true, ring away, ring my chimes!

(Remember The Gong Show?)

Trim, the Mystery

English is a funny language, with much grist for the humor mill (or humour mill, across the pond). George Carlin, who died this year, surely made much hay of our funny linguistic harvestings. Am I mixing enough metaphors here?

Trim got me thinking. We talk about "trimming the tree" at Christmastime, but in doing so we are adorning and adding ornaments. how is that trimming? Maybe the sense comes from trimming, or paring, the tree to its ornamentable size (as we did Saturday, when we hunted one down at a farm and hauled it home). I gladly participated in the ritual sawing and hoisting and erecting in the stand, then I took a nap and let the ladies have at it, ornamentwise (actually, I hate that overuse of -wise as a suffix; the estimable reference book Words Into Type cites a New Yorker cartoon in which one owl says to another something like, "So, wisewise, how are things?" HAHAHAHAAHAHAHAAHAHA. [H]owls of laughter). This year after bringing the box of ornaments down from the attic, I studiously avoided all manner of familial tension regarding the stringing of lights or placement of baubles. My nap on Sunday was luxuriously guilt-free (yes, the day after we fetched the tree from the proxy-quasi-semi-Bavarian forest).

But we trim our hair, which is taking away.

If you drill down far enough in the etymology of trim, you find that "trim a tree" is redundant, because trim is a tree, or was long ago, in the knotty-so-distant-past we sometimes pine for, oakay?

Psychopathy for Beginners

Just finished an engaging piece about psychopathy in the November 10, 2008, issue of The New Yorker. First, a word about the word "psychopathy" itself. As I was reading the article, "Suffering Souls," by John Seabrook, I more or less assumed that the word was pronounced with the accent on -path, but also wondered it might not be true, because, after all, we don't put the accent on -log in psychology. Sure enough, Merriam-Webster, with its pronunciation thingy-doodle audio device, informs us that the accent is on the -op. But I digress. The article explores how neuroscientists, especally Dr. Kent Kiehl, are studying the functional MRIs of prison inmates, to see if their brains function differently than the brain of, um, normal people. It all provokes fascinating and provocative questions about good, evil, justice, and salami-on-rye sandwiches. Sorry, I digress again. Uh-oh. A diagnostic checklist used to evaluate for psychopathy, the PCL-R, measures, among other things, poor impulse control (not mind-wanderingness, not exactly sort of). We are let off the hook, a bit, with this: "If a biological basis for psychopathy could be establshed and pharmacological treatments developed, the idea that many people have at least a little of the psychopath in them could well become acepted." Relax, will you? This is not making a pitch for the acceptance of antisocial behavior. I'm merely saying how intriguing it is to ponder how the brain works and how we move within very lmited realms, it seems. (On a similar note, NPR today had a bit about brain scans and what they reveal about our shopping and other choices. Buyology. Neuromarketing. Martin Lindstrom. Whew, I love "Mad Men, " but times have changed since Don Draper and his team at Sterling Cooper left the building.)

Seabrook's Q. and A. is here.

The Luminous Numina of the Ordinary

We wonder, what to write about?

Whatever is at hand.

John Updike's story, "The Full Glass," in the current New Yorker is a meditation inspired by a full glass of water.

There is a luminousness to numinous reality.

They say, count the stars.

This evening, I couldn't even begin to count the countless dandelions, their white orbs of seeds bobbing like the poppies on World War I Flanders fields, their yellowness shriveled or sleeping.

Numina.

Ah.

A Quarter for Your Thoughts

A recent piece by David Owen in The New Yorker magazine profiles the less-than-useless United States penny. For good measure, the article tosses in (like so many pennies into a coffee can) the idea of eliminating not only the penny but also the nickel -- and maybe even the dime, as in New Zealand (not to mention eliminating paper currency for the one- and two-dollar denominations).

It's an entertaining and informative bit of reportage, as you would expect from The New Yorker.

Speaking of coins, I learned a new (for me) coinage in reading the essay: negative seigniorage.

Negative seigniorage refers to the fact that the U.S. Mint loses money on every penny it produces to the tune of about $50 million a year (the cost of zinc being a factor as well as the zinc lobby).

It occurs to me that negative seigniorage has other connotations, namely:

-- You're both in bed naked but drift off to sleep reading the latest issue of the AARP magazine after each of you fails to conjure up an erotic fantasy figure to get things going.

-- You forget that you forgot to pay the AARP annual membership bill.

-- You snarl at the grandkids for disturbing your nap.

--John McCain.

Water You Know (Or Thought You Did)

In browsing through the March 24, 2008, issue of The New Yorker, trying to look as if I have risen above my modest station in life, I came across this sentence, discussing the Eliot Spitzer scandal, in a fine essay by Hendrik Hertzberg (ah, America's puritanism!):

"That's what Larry Craig and David Vitter, hypocrites of the first water, are doing; they have faded into the echoing hallways of the Capitol like guerrillas melting into a crowd of campesinos."

"Of the first water"?

I had always seen or heard the phrase "of the first order."

Turns out "of the first water" has a very cool, as in ice (as in diamonds), etymology, as reported in The Phrase Finder, a gem of a British website (which parenthetically does not enlighten us on "of the first order"):

First water - Of the

Meaning

Of the highest quality.

Origin

From the gem trade. The clarity of diamonds is assessed by their translucence; the more like water, the higher the quality. This comparison of diamonds with water dates back to at least the early 17th century, and Shakespeare alludes to it in Tymon of Athens, 1607. The 1753 edition of Chambers' Encyclopedia has this under an entry for 'Diamond':

"The first water in Diamonds means the greatest purity and perfection of their complexion, which ought to be that of the clearest drop of water. When Diamonds fall short of this perfection, they are said to be of the second or third water, &c. till the stone may be properly called a coloured one."

Subterranean Semicolon Celebration

What can be more delicious than this? The most popular emailed (I prefer this form instead of the hyphenated e-mailed) article over at the New York Times website (I prefer this, rather than the almost Victorian construction Web site) is about (ta-da):

The Semicolon

exclamation point

As you can see if you click on the word semicolon above, a sign on a New York City subway uses the lovely semicolon; it uses it correctly. Beautiful.

The only thing more delicious would be an erotic, semantic, linguistic, and cosmic embrace of the serial comma by The New York Times. (But, alas, The New York Times wouldn't do that; it would be too much like The New Yorker.)

(All hail to Neil Neches of New York City Transit! [pictured above, with his all-but invisible semicolon on the subway placard in the background])

Parting Shots

About a year ago, I mused on such grave matters as epitaphs.

How about "last words"? I just finished reading Joan Acocella's review in The New Yorker (10/8/07) of Julie Kavanagh's "Nureyev: The Life."

Rudolf Nureyev, the flashy ballet star, comes across as tragically solipsistic. He died at the age of 54, in January 1993.

His last words?

"Moby-Dick."

A little quiz. He said those words because:

a) In his grandeur, he was reaching for a suitable anatomical metaphor.

b) A movie of the same name was on the hospital TV.

c) He was relating a delirious homo-erotic fantasy.

d) He was planning a ballet about the Melville classic.

Acocella says it was b), but offers the conjecture that it would not be far-fetched if it were d).

What would be your last words? Good question, eh? I've always liked Gertrude Stein's purported last words. She is said to have asked Alice B. Toklas, "What is the answer?" When Toklas did not respond, Stein reportedly said, "In that case, what is the question?" and died.

I think "last words" assume you'll have the chance to utter anything intelligible.

How about a Groucho Marx echo: "Hello. I must be going."

Or: "Whoa!"

Or: "Oooops!"

Or: "See ya later. Thanks and love."

Or: "Laugh. Or else."

Yours?

p.s. Some say, "Parthian shot" became "parting shot" in English, though that is disputed.

The Revenge of the Busness Gods

Late as usual to work, I get in the car. Yesterday I gladly took the bus, but this morning I had already missed the 8:04 bus into downtown, so I proceeded to embrace the auto alternative (AA) (how many countless times since puberty have I quote embraced the auto alternative unquote?). Turn on AC , drive down the avenue, mail the subscription invoice to The Economist magazine with the word Cancel in purple ink written twice on it, via my work-supplied tres au courant Uniball Vision pen. I think The Economist is a terrific and first-rate 'zine, especially the weekly obit, but during my trial run I did not find time to read it; I barely have time to read the cartoons in the weekly issue of The New Yorker I subscribe to.

Rewind the narrative. Leave car running, walk six to eight steps to mailbox, insert mail, return to idling car, which is locked! All doors are locked, with cellphone sitting in plain view on the front seat, passenger side. I have never done this. Until now. It briefly reminds me of the time Violet G., in Dover, New Jersey, left her car running in her in-house garage below our apartment and almost killed us all with carbon monoxide, including newborn One and Only Son. (This was one time FirstSpouse's tendency toward paranoia proved invaluable, infinitely so. I owe her thanks for that. Infinitely so.) Walk up the avenue, and I mean uphill, in the heat, wondering why, and how. And fretting slightly over being ever later to work. Knock on our door. Fortunately, CurrentSpouse is not asleep yet from night-before work. She opens the door.

"What happened?"

"I was at the mailbox, and . . . "

"You mailed your keys," she replied in the fashion that longtime partners have of finishing each other's sentences.

"No, left 'em in the car, running. There's something wrong with me neurologically. I've never done that."

"You're just getting old," she said evenly and without rancor.

Grab her spare key off the rack of keys near the door (just about the only steadily organized aspect of our household). Walk fast and jog part way down the hill. Feck it. Slow down, I tell myself. Enjoy the whole episode. Roll with it. I feel light, almost laughing, not scolding myself for this lapse. "No judgment," as the beloved late Anthony DeMello pronounced frequently in the tapes I used to listen to in 1993, driving anywhere.

This is grace.

No ticket on the car. Nor is it towed away. (Glancing thought: In some cities this would look like a looming terror threat; such are the times.) Open door of idling car. Enter, sweating. Crank AC to max. Soothing.

Drive to work, with good success on the several traffic lights.

Manage a smile, upon entering work, greeting Mary V., at 10th-floor reception desk.

This is my little secret with the world. No high drama, no "poor me," no endless and tedious recounting to co-workers. The grace of anonymity.

Just gratitude to be in The Game (although the bus does indeed beckon me to return).

P.S. Didn't you read "busness" as "business"? I would have.

P.P.S. Change "gods" to "goddesses" if you are so inclined.

(Photo credits: Bus is in 'Yeats Country,' with mystical Ben Bulben in the background; and Pawlie Kokonuts walking in Sligo City.)

Bloomsday Blogsday 1, and Counting

Today is my first blogiversary. Or is that blogaversary? Maybe it's even a bit of blogslavery, shackled by semantics and the art and craft (and obsession) of saying (saying anything, anything at all, in almost any manner). (Incidentally and fittingly, June 16, is also Bloomsday, the day in 1904 when the fictional events in James Joyce's Ulysses take place, in Dublin.)

It started on a Thursday night and into Friday morning, wandering around the steamy back alleys of the World Wide Web (without the editor's choice of "Worldwide," which would have forever branded us with WW), teasing out the scene not far from Seattle, tempting my tendency toward the tawdry, when I should've been sleeping.

And so, the nom de plume Pawlie Kokonuts was hatched, with hats off to Paulie Walnuts.

The title of The Laughorist was a natural, since I had already started a store revolving around the concept of so-called laughorisms. And my first post, on solipsism, was indicative of a suspicion I harbored, and harvest, for this talking tour.

Looking back, I notice I received no Comments for a week; not until my 11th post (did I care? was I more pure then? less self-conscious?). The first Comment was from the blogger at Kierkegaard Lives. Thank you. (I see, he's still posting; we share similar layouts.) Most likely, I stopped at his blog and teased him into stopping by at my place, with a word or two on Soren Kierkegaard thrown in.

I confess I've not been the perfect blog community member or neighbor. By that, I mean I don't reciprocate Comments faithfully or even read other blogs consistently. And that is because it's hard enough for me just to keep this going, being of meager discipline and possessing little perseverance. Don't take it personally, or impersonally.

Thanks for stopping by. Then and now. I've met all those people you see linked n this page, as well as many others, and more who need to be linked. Or will be. Deo volente.

It's been a journey of linking, connecting, conversing, and cavorting. I've gotten more from all of you than I've put into it. Thank you.


Spotlight on Year 1

One Slice, With Legs

Testing Testosterone

Water You Know

We the People, We the Ephemerists

(which evoked the most Comments).

One easy discovery was, I can't be funny all the time, nor do I want to be (witness several posts on the deaths of loved ones, or on la petite mort, or on the death of deception or illusion).

And who would've guessed that I would get the most hits, so far, owing to my post on the serial comma, with chitchat coming from Vanity Fair and The New Yorker?

Again, thanks to all of you -- first-timers, late-comers, new-comers, toll-takers, big-talkers, and silent-partners (even if all those hyphens aren't truly needed).

Carry on.

Excelsior.

Age quod agis.

Memories Are Made of This

I know, I know, you were expecting my regular-octane juvenile humor: "Mammaries are made of this HAHAhahaha."

As for dissecting memories, it's been a recurring theme, not dream, of The Laughorist blog (soon to celebrate its first blogiversary). As surely Marcel Proust illustrated lushly to the extreme, our memories are tricky, subjective, and flirtatious; we rarely know what doors they will open. And we don't know if we dare believe what we see, hear, taste, smell, or feel when we walk through those memory doors. That was part of the thesis of Stumbling on Happiness: the human propensity to color, or discolor, past (or future) events.

I just read an interesting take on this sort of thing by Alec Wilkinson, in The New Yorker issue of May 28, 2007 (do we really not write "19" anymore? does anyone remember writing 19XX [well, not really the X's] on checks, essays, reports, summonses, divorce decrees, baptismal certificates, marriage licenses, postcards, and letters of resignation? I do).

The article is about one Gordon Bell, who is lifelogging. He is creating a personal archive, a database of everything he can scan into a computer about his current and past life. MyLifeBits is what the project's called. He now works for Microsoft and wears a special camera as part of this all-consuming venture and experiment (experiventure, call it).

We bloggers think we're obsessive?

Think again.

It's all rather intriguing. Bell, 72, one of the founders of the Internet who has been called the Frank Lloyd Wright of computers, and Microsoft want to see how computers act when they establish a responsive relationship with our memories, or what we digitally tell a computer is our memories. Thus, a computer could easily say, "Watch out, Pawlie, you are entering the trough you typically enter after 17.268954 days. And it will last 3.000012223 days."

Or so I gather.

There's all sorts of potential ramifications to this sort of thing, some wonderful, some frightful. Microsoft's Jim Gemmell says in the article, "People argue about the need to forget things, but if you look at business discipline -- advising that you write everything down, your goals and objectives, and return to them to see how you did, examining what went wrong -- I think the same thing could happen with our personal lives. Being able to say, 'Now I realize my tone of voice was threatening' -- I think there's a real positive aspect in having the real record of what things looked and sounded like, and sequences of events, because we often end up believing things that are not based on facts anymore."

Really, Jim? Great. That's all I need. Computer as Grand Inquisitor. Computer as Torquemada.

Leave it to a software engineer to quantify memory.

Imagine this after-the-so-called fact bedroom debriefing: a blow-by-blow analysis on the fruitfulness (or dearth of ripe yield) in the garden of earthly pleasures, id est, orgasm or its lack. Let's cal this the Sixth Circle of Hell. And the Seventh Circle of Hell would go beyond anyone's worst nightmare of "he said, she said." It would be a recording with painful precision not only of the words but also the feelings and motives of the players.

We don't even what to imagine applying this beyond the home to the workplace or the public arena.

O spare us, HAL 9000.

This digitalization of memory gives new meaning to that line by James Joyce, "History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake."

Maybe it's me. Maybe I'd rather take refuge in the facts as I remember them, filtered by my psyche, not HAL's.

(Wouldn't you?)

(Say, what would Steve Jobs and Apple say to all this?)

Is it all agonizingly Orwellian? Or enticingly Proustian?

Wilkinson, a fine writer (I once read an essay he wrote about the legendary New Yorker editor William Maxwell, whom I met, briefly, in the 1980s, wherein Maxwell told the young Wilkinson to send a manuscript by means of letters to Maxwell; brilliant), writes: "Memory revises itself endlessly. We remember a vivid person, a remark, a sight that was unexpected, an occasion on which we felt something profoundly. The rest falls away. We become more exalted in our memories than we actually were, or less so. The interior stories we tell about ourselves rarely agree with the truth."

Whatever that is.

May you remember This.

Postvacation Vacancy Syndrome

Warning (Achtung!):

I hereby declare sole copyright, ownership, and blogospheric citation privileges for the term Postvacation Vacancy Syndrome (PVS). PVS, often confused with jet lag, is characterized by the following symptoms (along with others that will be attached and codified hereunto vis-a-vis quid pro quo de minimis with the incorporation of your comments [and yours, too]):

• The inability to formulate common words, phrases, or gesticulations native to one's native tongue or culture (such as it is).
• The overwhelming urge to cease working (no matter the profession, vocation, or status) immediately and forever.
• An obsessive and compulsive desire to consult tram, train, airplane, bus, or subway schedules.
• Profusive sweating and rapid heartbeat brought on by: a) work tasks you were asked to complete in prevacation mode (but may not have completed and probably totally forgot), b) tasks newly revealed through multiple e-mails or voicemails greeting you upon arrival back at your "job," c) tasks requested in the minutes upon returning to your job -- and due immediately, d) any of the above, e) all of the above, or f) none of the above.
• A lassitude and lethargy toward anything not involving sightseeing, journaling, picture-taking, or sitting in a cafe reading the International Herald Tribune, The New Yorker, or a local newspaper. (Speaking of The New Yorker, reading about a dodo bird expedition to Mauritius consumed much of my reading time on the return trip to Amerika. Entertaining and informative, but doesn't one really want sleep inducement in such a situation? [And don't criticize me for having the introductory phrase of the preceding sentence modify the wrong subject. After all, I am suffering from PVS.])
• The persistent and recurring delusion that you can move to an exotic location (or mundane foreign location) and succeed financially, romantically, intellectually, artistically, and emotionally (perfectly).

Beware of PVS!

It lurks everywhere and masquerades as jet lag, exhaustion, immaturity, ADHD, midlife crisis, and angst.

Or else, embrace it fully and voluptuously.

Laugh. Or....

Else.

p.s. Sheeesh! After first posting this, I discovered that PVS also stands for "persistent vegetative state." Who knew?